Sunday, September 16, 2012

Mitt Romney gave an in depth interview to EWTN about a month ago. The interview was excellent; it really seemed to effectively help you get to know him as a man and as a leader. By far the most significant thing in the interview was the discussion about freedom, specifically freedom of religion:

Raymond Arroyo: The Catholic community in this country and people across the faith spectrum were outraged by President Obama’s HHS Mandate – requiring abortifacients and contraceptives to be made available to employees. It set off protests by the Catholic bishops and individual people of faith. What will you do as president about that HHS Mandate?

Gov. Romney: Well, first of all I’ll continue to meet with to Cardinal [Timothy] Dolan [of New York and President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops] – who by the way is going to offer the benediction on the last evening of the Republican Convention after my acceptance speak. So I am making it very clear that the interest of religious freedom is something I support wholeheartedly and will work with him and with others to assure that each piece of legislation that we consider is thought also in terms of its impact on religious freedom and tolerance. This is a nation where our first freedom is the right to worship God as we choose, and any effort on the part of the federal government to intrude on religious liberty and to reject tolerance in favor of a government mandate is a violation of that first freedom.

It was probably as successful as anything else he has done in order to make himself accessible and real, and it places him in stark contrast to President Obama who sems to disdain people of faith and continuously reduces freedom of religion to "freeodom of worship."